This poem doesn’t need explanation, at least if you have visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Outside Japan you may only know these names because of the atomic bomb. This single reductive moment does not define Nagasaki, nor Hiroshima.
Nagasaki is not the bomb, not future nullified
No present, obliterated past.
Not the mere shadowed imprint
Of a flash of falling fire
Not just the runner up
In Hiroshima’s winning race.
Hiroshima, where one brilliant August day
The silver bird dropped Little Boy
On children in their play.
A brilliant day just like when we were on the sacred peak of Mount Misen
On Miyajima, as high as eagles, looking down
On Hiroshima, across the aching beauty of the bay
It must have looked like that, that other sunny day …
But in living Nagasaki, we didn’t find
A peace park at its heart
The city’s heart is by the water
By the bay, where Japan’s locked door
Was left ajar
Where sailing ships came laden to the Dejima
Carrying goods and things unknown.
Down by the bay,
Where in Meiji times
Glover settled
And from him
Japan mastered ‘modern’ ways.
Down by the bay in Nagasaki
Where samurai exchanged swords for suits
And from the bay they travelled and the world embraced
And when they’d done, home again
They came.
Image
Japanese translation of a book of anatomy. Dejima museum, Nagasaki.
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